Ok, I'm back for a few more minutes. One kid is out of the bath and the other is still wanting to splash around, so I'm letting her. I can monitor her from the computer, so she'll be ok in there for a few more minutes!

Anyway, so I went up to the first vendor and started to look at the displays. A salesman pounced on me, of course. He spoke pretty good English, broken, but I could understand him and he could understand me, so that worked well. I started to look at the cameras, looking at the most compact ones first. They were mainly point and shoot and not better than what I already had, so I worked my way up. I saw the Nikon Coolpix line. I know people who have them, they've always gotten good reviews. First I looked at the 4600, then the 5600 and the 5900. I didn't know this at the time, but they are all relatively new releases. The differences were pixels - the 4600 was a 4.0 mp, the 5600 and the 5900 were 5mp. I decided that if I was going to get a new one anyway, might as well go for the 5mp cameras. So then the differences between the 5600 and the 5900 was the quality of the lens, the amount of features and the size of the LCD screen. Of course, the 5900 was better in all of these. So, I asked how much for each. The 5600 was $250 and the 5900 was $320. I didn't know this at the time either, but both prices was below US MSRP.

So then I needed things like an extra battery, a large SD card (since the cameras used a memory card that was different from what I already had), a battery charger. That added about $130 to the total. Ok, that was a little much than what I was hoping. So I started to "hem and haw" about buying it. About 5 minutes of that, the guy dropped the total by $10. Still "hemming and hawing"; 5 more minutes and another $10 fell off the price, which was now at $430. And he threw in a hard cover case for the camera too! (I've since looked that up, its about $20 for that case.) LOL I was still not ready to buy, not necessarily because of the price, but because I am a second-guesser when it comes to buying something like this. I felt like I hadn't done enough research (usually I spend days online researching and searching for a good deal). I finally decided to try to bargain more and punched on the calculator $420. The salesguy looked at me with incredulous eyes and said "That price?" I said, "Yeah" and then he took the calculator, did some calculating of his own (presumably to see if that price would set him below his required profit margin) and then came back and said with a sigh, "Ok". I knew from that little scene that I couldn't get him to go lower than that. So, I bought it!

Chris started to get out the money (he had withdrawn some money in anticipation of this) to pay. He counted out the money and while he was doing that, the salesman went to the back of his "store" and brought out a shoulder camera bag and put it on the counter with all my stuff. He said, "service" (which means free here). LOL Maybe I could have gone lower! But even so, that was a good deal for all that I got. YAY!